To quote Bill Gates: "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten." I stumbled across that pearl recently on a Website called BrainyQuote, which triggered a memory of a televised interview with Gates, done around 2000, in which he said much the same with particular reference to the Internet.
The quote I read online ended with, "Don't let yourself be lulled into inaction." With Microsoft now having arguably been passed in relevance by Amazon.com and Google (and "arguably" is generous), Gates may not have taken his own wisdom fully to heart. But in any case, his application of the principle to the Web proved prescient. Even before 2000, everyone had recognized the potential of e-commerce. By 2002, the business landscape was littered with failed dot-coms, and today, buying and selling online is stitched more tightly into everyday life than even a Pollyanna would have guessed a decade ago.
It looks like a similar sequence of scenarios may coalesce with regard to cloud computing. Everyone recognizes its potential, and every technology vendor is now a cloud vendor -- just ask them and they'll tell you, even those that are simply repackaging last year's "service-oriented architecture" as this year's "private cloud service." Yet right now, the revenue pie isn't nearly large enough to support the hordes that are angling for a slice of it. (For all that you've heard about software as a service, the highest-profile subset of the cloud, that entire market was a mere $7.5 billion in size last year, according to Gartner.) If there is a load of failures over the next couple years, as seems likely, it will show that the short-term impact of the cloud was overestimated.
That the long-term outlook may be underestimated is reflected in the message emanating from some companies, mostly larger ones, that they cannot foresee a day when they will entrust their most sensitive information and systems to the cloud. With all due respect, it seems very unlikely that such a day will never come. Data-security concerns will be overcome, and probably sooner than later. Even companies that remain unconvinced on the security issue will have a hard time matching up on costs with competitors that trade a physical infrastructure for a virtual one, so eventually they will move as well. Only a handful of corporate behemoths make a convincing case that many of their key computing workloads will continue to enjoy greater economies of scale when handled within their own data centers.
Cloud-based ERP functionality even for large companies will be on the table; already SAP and, a bit more equivocally, Oracle are making rumblings about moving in that direction. Frankly, I don't think we're going to have to wait 10 years before we see that "cloud computing" and "computing" have morphed into pretty much the same thing. |
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